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CLOUDFEST conference for hosters

As every year, Sysbee were present on Cloudfest ( ex. WHD ) this year too. We talked about our products and services, attend great lectures and join a party with Lords of Uptime.

Everything is changing in recent years, but WHDCLOUDFEST stays same. Maybe name has changed, but the essence of the conference itself is same. A little bit of fair, a little bit lectures, a little bit party, this is CLOUDFEST in a nutshell.
Some say that it is too much sales talks on CLOUDFEST, yes it is a lot of sales talks, of course, it is, but there is also a great networking event. You can see what is going on in hosting world those days, and if you were on CLOUDFEST
every year, you can clearly see what products and technologies are here to stay, and what is just a hype of the moment.

As of 2013, CLOUDFEST is taking place in Europa Park. A stunning theme park, located in Rust, Baden-Wittenberg in Germany, almost on French border. The venue is fantastic, huge theme park, almost empty since the season is not yet started,
with fantastic scenery of all Europe, great attractions, which, by the way, you can all try for free during the event. Yes, you read it right, roller-coasters are free during the event. The venue is also big congress center, so there is a lot of space to throw a conference like this.
Theme park usually opens for a general public week after CLOUDFEST, so every now and then you will find some workers doing a last-minute tweak on some venues in a park, but it is not show stopper,
sometimes it is fun looking at them cleaning lower part of park benches, as you would expect in Germany.

The conference itself consists of talks, usually done by vendors, or their guests and fair in lobbies and halls of Europa Park's conference center. Talks are fantastically moderated, by professional moderators and speakers who are fluent in English language,
so usually, with some exceptions, is very easy to follow. Most of the talks are sales oriented, so, not very interesting for IT operations staff, but FOR CEO's and CTO's this is great opportunity to talk with vendors, and usually much easier to make custom
deals as you can talk in person. A lot of vendors bring developers and technicians with them to a conference, so you can talk with them on their boots more or less about everything from technical implementations, to future roadmaps of their products.
Also, meeting vendors who you are working online through shopping carts, support tickets and telephone calls in person, talk about their products, hear a story or two behind a product, and grab a beer with them afterward is priceless.

CLOUDFEST is great regarding networking since there are always few thousands of hosters, you can always talk with people in your industry, share experiences and hear how they cope with problems and difficulties.
No matter there legislative issues, technical issues and implementations, or some new product and their experiences with it. Sometimes, when you think that you are only one struggling with some issue, you usually find somebody who has the same problem and is some other workaround you would never be thought that it can be fixed like that. It is also a great opportunity for making partnerships and collaborations, since everybody is in the same industry, and everybody is usually seeking for opportunities like this, as you do.

Parties on CLOUDFEST are great. From "get2gether" party on Monday evening to Beerfest on Thursday, and not to mention Big, main party on Wednesday. This year we had a Rammstein tribute band, but over the past years, we had Snap, Ace of Base, Right Said Fred, and many, many others.
Food and dring on the whole conference are free, yes, free. And there is every two hours coffee break, with sweets and sandwiches. Usually, all you can eat or drink, And yes, there is free beer on every party, the whole night.

We, at Sysbee are moving away from a classic hosting business, more to managed services, but still, CLOUDFEST conference is still the most important hosting event in the world, even for us, so we will keep attending CLOUDFEST in future too.

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Sysbee is a group of system engineers and infrastructure architects dedicated to bringing DevOps culture to small and medium-sized enterprises, with over 15 years of experience in the field of cloud and web services hosting.

To us, DevOps is more than just a buzzword. It’s a culture in which our system engineers have a close collaboration with our clients and their developers to pursue the main goal of having the most stable, secure, scalable and cost effective IT infrastructure.

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